Yapta’s building catches fire in Pioneer Square

The Seattle startup, which plans to unveil its online travel service Tuesday, received unexpected news early today when its Pioneer Square headquarters building caught on fire. While there’s an estimated $1.1 million in damage in the three story Metropole Building, Yapta Chief Executive Tom Romary says the 7-person startup is going ahead with their planned Web site launch.

“There is nothing to prevent us from launching, we are good. We just can’t physically get in our building right now, because the fire department won’t let us in,” said Romary.

The company has set up temporary offices at one of their investor’s offices in downtown Seattle, with their computer servers located in Tukwila. “I hope it is a good omen, who knows,” said Romary. “It will be one of those things in the history of our company that the day we launched is the day that our offices went up in flames.”

Romary, a former marketing executive at HouseValues and Alaska Airlines, said most of the damage occurred in the market and the Indian restaurant on the first floor.

“I feel sorry for those guys, because unlike our company, we can set up shop anywhere at any moment,” said Romary, who visited the building this morning and spoke with some of the other tenants.

Yapta has about 750 square feet on the second floor, though it had planned to take another 1,900 square feet in a portion of the building directly above where the fire broke out. Romary didn’t know if or when they would be able to move back into the building, with some of the employees scouring Craigslist today for office space.

“We didn’t lose any equipment as far we know, but from what we can tell there is no water damage or smoke damage. Because of the way the building is structured there are these massive brick walls separating sections of the building. And this huge brick wall separated the market, which was ablaze, from our side of the building and also the floors are made of cement so the floor protected any fire from going up.”

Yapta is working on a new way for people to track the fluctuating prices of airfares and receive refunds from airlines. I plan to have more details on how Yapta works, which has been operating in stealth mode for nearly a year, in an upcoming story.